Why are private companies so committed to the Israeli narrative? I don’t get it.
this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2025
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Fediverse vs Disinformation
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Reuters isn't reporting what happened, they're reporting on what Israel said happened.
They are, to the best of their abilities, a non-editorial news source.
"Israel lies about target of attack" is editorial, regardless of accuracy.
The report about what happened is a different article
In the content of the article about Israels statement they open with it being journalists who were killed, continue to point out that they had been there for weeks and that it's normal for news outlets to do this, which is why multiple news agencies were at that location. They also only refer to the targets as "alleged targets" who were "allegedly militants".
They also list the report about the man and his killing by Israeli forces above the story of what Israel said about it.
We've gotten very used to media being by default editorial in nature. It doesn't just say what happened, it tells us how to feel about what happened. A handful of new agencies still try to report on facts, and leave qualitative judgement for the reader.
This does result in odd headlines sometimes when they report on stories they are involved in. Like this headline (which has been revised), or when the AP dutifully reports on the white house calling them lunatics for following standard journalistic writing style, mysteriously detailed in the "AP style guide".
Neutrality free from context or interpretation of any sort is opening the door for lies to have equal ground with the truth. Needing that context to be present in the headline without reading the body is starting to erode the notion of being unbiased.
Nothing about being a "non-editorial news source" requires them to put misinformation in the title.
Did they put misinformation in the headline?
How would you report on the IDF releasing an initial report that said they didn't kill them on purpose?
Does their rephrasing of the headline to "Reuters and AP journalists killed in Gaza strike were not 'a target,' an Israeli military spokesperson says" make a difference?
I'm not saying it was a perfect headline, but it's hardly misinformation.
Yes, that rephrasing helps. Or something along the lines of "Israel Denies Deliberate Targeting of Reuters Journalist in Killing".
All of these options are factual. Every redaction has an editorial policy. The choice not to contextualize a headline is an editorial choice by definition. So is the choice of which institutions' press briefings to report on.
"[Redaction] doesn't editorialize titles" is as much of an oxymoron as "[Government official] doesn't do politics". The unwillingness to take accountability for unavoidable decisions is a huge red flag and points to either duplicity or a very submissive approach to decision-making.
It's true that all publishing decisions are ultimately editorial, but there's a big difference between deciding to report on what IDF and Hamas representatives say while not reporting on social media opinion, and reporting speculation and interpretation of events.
I don't feel like they failed to contextualize the headline. It was a subpar headline updated for clarity shortly after publication.
There just seems to be a lot of jumping on one of the more factual and objective news sources for a headline taken out of context for failing to include sufficient context.
It's virtually impossible to conclusively prove ill-intent for any individual headline like this. However on the whole there is a clear bias from mainstream media outlets towards under-critically perpetuating Israel's official, carefully controlled narrative – a narrative that they control in part through their own legitimacy as a recognized state, and in part through the deliberate murder and suppression of journalists.
Israeli state officials keep putting out factually incorrect, disingenuous, harmful public statements to distract from their ongoing genocide. It pollutes an already VERY saturated information space, and any headline that uncritically passes on such a decontextualized F.U.D. fails its duty as journalistic messaging.
Again, it could be an honest mistake from Reuters. But in such troubled times, it's getting very hard to forgive those mistakes as innocent when the impact of such repeated failures has been so great.
I mean, you can go look at Reuters headlines for the middle east.
https://www.reuters.com/world/israel-hamas/
It's hardly uncritically accepting of Israels narrative goals, which would be expected for a news outlet that tries to report objectively.
Given that the initial headline, which I don't think was as bad as people are responding, was shortly changed and their long history of good reporting and current history of seemingly not following someones dictated narrative, I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Sure, I'm not trying to dunk on Reuters specifically, I don't really care either way. It's about the principle of the thing, and the overall pattern of uncritical reporting in mainstream media.
F.U.D. is a strategy that works exceptionally well. It only takes a few headlines to sow the seeds of doubt that make uncontroversial stances increasingly untenable. Whether it's Trump's transparent lies, Big Oil/Tobacco/Asbestos' transparent funding of bogus "studies", or Israeli genocide denial, it doesn't matter; once these narratives are allowed to spread decontextualized and uncontradicted, well-intentioned actors are forced to spend an wildly asymmetric amount of time and energy into debunking insane and disingenuous claims before they can even begin to lay out their own arguments.
With this in mind I don't think it's unreasonable for people to be mad that a respectable journalistic institution would let even a single headline through that uncritically propagates Israeli F.U.D. covering up for war crimes.
I mean, I honestly don't think "Initial inquiry says Hamas camera target of Israeli strike that killed journalists" is uncritical propagation of Israeli FUD.
It's not a good title, since it clearly causes a misunderstanding and it doesn't convey key information like "whose investigation", but it's not disinformation.
FUD != Disinformation.
Propagating a lie without conveying that it's coming from a notorious liar is technically correct but also the very definition of FUD.
Yes. If a Rwandese government spokesperson said the same thing about Rwandese military killing a Reuters journalist in eastern Kivu, Reuters would not quote their statement as "initial inquiry says". And likewise if China said the same thing about Chinese military killing a Reuters journalist in Xinyang province.
Reuters would be skeptical towards a genocidal regime with a long history of lying to Reuters if that genocidal regime wasn't in NATO. It would clarify who was doing the inquiry just to remind readers and journalists buying the story off them that that organisation is not to be trusted.
Headlines are compact. Their words are carefully chosen. Leaving out who is doing the inquiry is as much of a statement as any other word choice. Anyone who reads headlines understands that leaving it out means the inquiry is being done by a relatively trusted institution.
But yeah, of course it's "hardly misinformation". That's how all good propaganda works. If a news source lies to you, you're better off not reading it. But if it tells you truths in a misleading way, then maybe the truth can empower you more than the misleadingness can harm you...
What about when nearly the exact same thing happened and they reported it was baseless?
Or when one of their staff was killed by Russia, but they couldn't confirm ukranian statements that it was a Russian missile so they reported the ukranian statement and made it clear that the could not confirm if it was Russia or if it was deliberate?
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/reuters-staff-hit-strike-hotel-ukraines-kramatorsk-2024-08-25/
I'm incredulous that Reuters should be categorized as Israeli propaganda because one headline, clarified shortly after publication, is accurate but lacking an explicit source.
That's why getting your news from a screen shot of a screenshot of Twitter isn't a good idea. A new source can correct or clarify a headline, but the screenshot is forever.
Also, Israel isn't in NATO. I'm not sure if you meant that as another caveat but it sounded like you were saying they were.
Should I dismiss your comment as misinformation because it appears you implied that Israel was in NATO?
True story, in media, the article authors do not write the headlines, for some stupid reason.
If "Israel claims that it was a Hamas camera" is misinformation, then that means Israel has never made that claim.
Are you sure the inquite made by Israel did not claim that it was a Hamas camera? Where did Reuters invent the claim, which is quite damning for Israel? (And if Israel never made that erroneous claim in their inquiry but Reuters lies that they did, doesn't that make Reuters anti-Israel rather than pro-Israel?)
Well, I'm saying Benjamin Netanyahu, while masturbating to a real time generated video of adolf hitler that copies his movements like a mirror, said "anyone not actively trying to kill me is antisemitic".
Why hasn't reuters reported that yet?
I'm sorry, but reporting something the known lying liar says without a disclaimer when you have the most spectacular possible proof (literally a live stream! Your live stream!) to the contrary is not 'reporting what happened'. It is amplifying a lie about what happened.
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People not understanding what a news wire service is never fails to surprise me
palestine doesn't have a lot of money
who doees I wonder
Reuters operates more like an NGO than a private company. It's the British version of its American equivalent AP.
Technically it's private, but so are all NGOs. Doesn't mean they don't do odd politically motivated things that no normal private company would do with a plain profit motive.
Now we see here that sometimes having more than a plain profit motive is worse. It can be. It just means different. People act like having a profit motive is the worst thing possible, but it's really not. You can do worse.
You could operate as a quasi state-sponsored news agency with connections to multiple governments and shill propaganda for them while pretending to be the very core institution of respectable journalism. But this is just a way to make the lines of "respectable journalism" equivalent to the agencies that will jump when a government says jump.
I'd argue that organizations chasing money can very closely mirror a "quasi state-sponsored news agency [...] pretending to be the very core institution of respectable journalism" as you loosely put it.
I'm not specifically calling out any organization in particular, but I have come to be very cynical of almost all news sources and journalism over the last couple decades. Journalism is a hollow shell of what it once was, omission of relevant and factual context is normalized, propaganda is factualized, and people are scared to report the truth unabashedly.
There is too much incentive to spin propaganda, even with the best intentions and organizational structuring.
This is extremely disrespectful to their employee who is now dead.
They don't serve their slaves, they serve Israel.
Always have
the headline claims “initial inquiry”….
which, being bound by journalistic integrity, they must report what Israel says without editorializing.
In this article and a subsequent one they state that it was their cameraman and he was murdered, and Israel lied.
But, when they asked Isreal for a statement (initial inquiry), Isreal said it was a Hamas Camera….
One really important takeaway: Israel didn’t claim they thought he had a weapon, they acknowledged that they knew it was a camera.
Regardless of what reuters does or doesn't say, what kind of explanation/justification is targetting "hamas camera"?
The supposed justification is that there was a camera used by Hamas to monitor IDF operations for military purposes. So "Hamas camera" would be used in the same capacity as "US spy satellite".
Leaving the veracity if that claim aside, attacking a hospital to destroy a camera being used to observe your forces operating dangerously close to a hospital is not great.
Also they "double tapped". So after the initial strike they attacked the same spot again to kill the people trying to rescue wounded.
It is a war crime tactic also popular with Russia in their attack on Ukraine.
These kind of attacks are always geared at maximizing civilian casualties by killing rescuers. This does not make sense for destroying supposed equipment.
well next step will probably be "that hospital was full of hamas babies"
next step
Buddy, feels like that step happened a while back
I mean yea kind of but I somehow feel like they haven't yet said "hamas babies". I don't know, I am grasping at straws here trying to imagine how much lower they can go.
Here's the article. The headline now says:
Reuters and AP journalists killed in Gaza strike were not 'a target,' an Israeli military spokesperson says
According to the "last updated" field, the article was last updated 8 hours before OP made this post on Lemmy. ~~It's possible the headline was changed, but this may also have been the original headline -- I can't find any record of the previous headline on Reuters, including Internet Archive.~~ (Edit: the headline was changed; see comment.)
Seeing as this is "Fediverse vs Disinformation," I think posters have a duty to verify the web page actually reads the way they are claiming at the time they post, or else provide context that the headline has changed.
do you have another archive link? are we sure this is actually the same original article because the entire content of the article is now different, not just the headline. how could we independently check?
This wasn't a hit but your skepticism is well tuned. Stay vigilant.
I think it's still important to provide the context that the headline has been changed.
It is, you're right. There could stand to be much stricter submission policies and review procedures on news submissions generally on this network, imho. It's tedious thankless work that desperately needs doing.
Hussam al-Masri
Well, there's your problem. Everyone knows that when Israel says "Hamas", they mean that sort of person.
Isreal controls your media.
Reuters does not say that. It only reports on Israel's stated motivation.
If even a few articles are outright lies, why should I trust the rest? I'll take it as a suggestion at most
I see no problem with this headline - when the narrative shifts after the next inquiry Reuters will report what that says as well… and will keep a trail of the shifting story that the IDF / Israeli government try to spin.
People need to learn how to read.
(Although Reuters would have done better if they had used the word "claims")
They updated the headline, likely because it created some confusion.
Reuters and AP journalists killed in Gaza strike were not 'a target,' an Israeli military spokesperson says
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